Despite all their fears, we ask very little of the ones who never loved us. We do not ask for sympathy or pain or compassion. We simply want to know why.

It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love.

How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.

When you were a little girl, Madam.....was this the woman you dreamed of becoming?

I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do, but either walk around or read a book or work on your book.

Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?

It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another's heart.

We are each the love of someone's life.

When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother.

No one would have known, from how he held my hand, [that] over the years of heartache he had hatched a plot to change my life forever. He held his grip and would not let me go. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain.

Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course you know it like a memory.

How hollow to have no secrets left you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone.

For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I'm working on, I'll say, it's a time travel novel. I haven't written very much of it. That's the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don't write their fiction there, they just do their research.

The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?

Surely words are just the background music when passion pounces on a soul.

It may be a childish torment, but we do not get to choose our demons.

So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.